They were already waiting in the audience chamber when the Queen strode in, and she did stride; to do so, she had discovered, spoke of confidence and authority, neither of which her meager bodily endowments reinforced. The little King was seated on his throne, a smaller edifice one step lower than the great ebony and gilt chair which was her own seat. Until he had proven his manhood by quickening his sister/ wife, he would not be elevated any higher. Clad in the purple tunic and cape of the Macedonian kings, he was an attractive boy in a very Macedonian way, blond, blue-eyed, more Thracian than Greek. His mother had been his father’s half sister, her mother a princess of Arabian Nabataea. But the Semite didn’t show at all in the thirteenth Ptolemy, whereas in Cleopatra, his half sister, it did. Her mother had been the daughter of the awesome King Mithridates of Pontus, a big, tall woman with the dark yellow hair and dark yellow eyes peculiar to the Mithridatidae. Therefore the thirteenth Ptolemy had more Semitic blood than his half sister; yet she looked the Semite.
A Tyrian purple cushion encrusted with gold and pearls enabled the Queen of Alexandria and Egypt to sit on that too-big chair and place her feet on something solid; without it, her toes could not touch the dais of purple marble.
“Is Gnaeus Pompey on his way?” she asked.
Potheinus answered. “Yes, lady.”
She could never make up her mind which of the two she disliked more, Potheinus or Theodotus. The Lord High Chamberlain was the more imposing, and bore witness to the fact that eunuchs were not necessarily short, plump and effeminate. His testicles had been enucleated in his fourteenth year, a little late perhaps, and at the direction of his father, a Macedonian aristocrat with huge ambitions for his very bright son. Lord High Chamberlain was the greatest position at court and could be held only by a eunuch, a peculiar result of the crisscrossed Egyptian and Macedonian cultures; it was inflicted upon one of pure Macedonian blood because the ancient Egyptian traditions dictated it. A subtle, cruel and very dangerous man, Potheinus. Mouse-colored curls, narrow grey eyes, handsome features. He was, of course, plotting to spill her from the throne and replace her with her half sister Arsinoe, the full sister of the thirteenth Ptolemy.
Theodotus was the effeminate one, despite his intact testicles. Willowy, pale, deceptively weary. Neither a good scholar nor a true teacher, he had been a great intimate of her father, Auletes, and owed his position to that happy chance. Whatever he taught the thirteenth Ptolemy had nothing to do with history, geography, rhetoric or mathematics. He liked boys, and one of the most galling facts of Cleopatra’s life was the knowledge that Theodotus would have sexually initiated her brother well before her brother was deemed old enough to consummate their marriage. I will have to take, she thought, Theodotus’s leavings. If I live that long. Theodotus too wants to replace me with Arsinoe. He and Potheinus know that they cannot manipulate me. What fools they are! Don’t they understand that Arsinoe is as unmanageable as I am? Yes, the war to own Egypt has begun. Will they kill me, or will I kill them? But one thing I have vowed. The day Potheinus and Theodotus die, my brother will die too. Little viper!
*
The audience chamber was not the throne room. In that vast conglomeration of buildings there were rooms, even palaces within the palace, for every kind of function and functionary. The throne room would have stunned a Crassus; the audience chamber was enough to stun Gnaeus Pompey. The architecture of the complex, inside as well as outside, was Greek, but Egypt had a say too, as much of the adornment fell to the lot of the priest-artists of Memphis. Thus the audience chamber walls were partially covered in gold leaf, partially in murals of a sort foreign to this Roman ambassador. Very flat and stilted, two-dimensional people, animals, palms and lotuses. There were no statues and no items of furniture other than the two thrones on the dais.
To either side of the dais stood a gigantic man so bizarre Gnaeus Pompey had only heard of such people, apart from a woman in a side show at the circus during his childhood days; though she had been very beautiful, she did not compare to these two men. They were clad in gold sandals and short leopard-skin kilts belted with jeweled gold, and had gold collars flashing with jewels about their throats. Each one gently plied a massive fan on a long gold rod, its base more jeweled gold, its breeze-making part the most wonderful feathers dyed many colors, huge and fluffy. All of which was as nothing compared to the beauty of their skins, which were black. Not brown, black. Like a black grape, thought Gnaeus Pompey, glossy yet powdered with plummy must. Tyrian purple skins! He had seen faces like theirs before on little statues; when a good Greek or Italian sculptor was lucky enough to see one, he seized upon the amazing person immediately. Hortensius had owned a statue of a boy, Lucullus the bronze bust of a man. But again, mere shadows alongside the reality of these living faces. High cheekbones, aquiline noses, very full but exquisitely delineated lips, black eyes of a peculiar liquidity. Topped by close-cropped hair so tightly curled that it had the look of the foetal goat pelt from Bactria that the Parthian kings prized so much they alone were allowed to wear it.
“Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus!” gushed Potheinus, rushing forward in his purple tunic and chlamys cloak with the chain of his high estate draped athwart his shoulders. “Welcome, welcome!”
“I am not Magnus!” snapped Gnaeus Pompey, very annoyed. “I am plain Gnaeus Pompeius! Who are you, the crown prince?”
The female on the bigger, higher throne spoke in a strong, melodic voice. “That is Potheinus, our Lord High Chamberlain,” she said. “We are Cleopatra, Queen of Alexandria and Egypt. In the names of Alexandria and Egypt we bid you welcome. As for you, Potheinus, if you wish to stay, step back and don’t speak until you’re spoken to.”
Oho! thought Gnaeus Pompey. She doesn’t like him. And he doesn’t like taking orders from her one little bit.
“I am honored, great Queen,” Gnaeus Pompey said, three lictors to either side of him. “And this, I presume, is King Ptolemy?”
“Yes,” said the Queen curtly.
She weighed about as much as a wet dishcloth was Gnaeus Pompey’s verdict, was probably not five Roman feet tall when she stood up, had thin little arms and a scrawny little neck. Lovely skin, darkly olive yet transparent enough to display the blueness of the veins beneath it. Her hair was a light brown and done in a peculiar fashion, parted in a series of inch-wide bands back from brow to a bun on the nape of her neck; all he could think of was the similarly banded rind of a summer melon. She wore the white ribbon of her sovereign’s diadem not across her forehead but behind the hairline, and was simply clad in the Greek style, though her robe was the finest Tyrian purple. No precious thing on her person save for her sandals, which looked as if they were never designed to be walked in, so flimsy was their gold.
The light, which poured in through unshuttered apertures high in the walls, was good enough for him to see that her face was depressingly ugly, only the single charm of youth to soften it. Wide eyes that he fancied were green-gold, or perhaps hazel. A good mouth for kissing save that it was held grimly. And a nose to rival Cato’s for size, a mighty beak hooked like a Jew’s. Hard to see any Macedonian in this young woman. A purely eastern type.
“It is a great honor to receive you in audience, Gnaeus Pompeius,” she went on in that powerfully mellifluous voice, her Greek perfect and Attic. “We are sorry we cannot speak to you in Latin, but we have never had the opportunity to learn it. What may we do for you?”
“I imagine that even at this remotest end of Our Sea, great Queen, you are aware that Rome is engaged in a civil war. My father—who is called Magnus—has been obliged to flee from Italia in the company of Rome’s legitimate government. At the moment he is in Thessalonica preparing to meet the traitor Gaius Julius Caesar.”
“We are aware, Gnaeus Pompeius. You have our sympathy.”
“That’s a start,” said Gnaeus Pompey with all the cheerful lack of politesse his father had made famous, “but not enough. I am here to ask for material aid, not expressions of condolence.”
; “Quite so. Alexandria is a long journey to obtain expressions of condolence. We had gathered that you have come to seek our—er—material aid. What kind of aid?”
“I want a fleet consisting of at least ten superior warships, sixty good transport vessels, sailors and oarsmen in sufficient numbers to power them, and every one of the sixty transports filled to the brim with wheat and other foodstuffs,” Gnaeus Pompey chanted.
The little King moved on his minor throne, turned his head—which also wore the white ribbon of the diadem—to look at the Lord High Chamberlain and the slender, effeminate man beside him. His elder sister, who was also his wife—how decadently convoluted these eastern monarchies were!—promptly reacted exactly as a Roman elder sister might have. She was holding a gold and ivory scepter, and used it to rap him across the knuckles so hard that he let out a yelp of pain. His pretty, pouting face returned to the front and stayed there, his bright blue eyes winking away tears.
“We are delighted to be asked to give you material aid, Gnaeus Pompeius. You may have all the ships you require. There are ten excellent quinqueremes in the boat sheds attached to the Cibotus Harbor, all designed to carry plenty of artillery, all endowed with the best oaken rams, and all highly maneuverable. Their crews are rigorously trained. We will also commandeer sixty large, stout cargo vessels from among those belonging to us. We own all the ships of Egypt, commercial as well as naval, though we do not own all the merchant ships of Alexandria.”
The Queen paused, looked very stern—and very ugly. “However, Gnaeus Pompeius, we cannot donate you any wheat or other foodstuffs. Egypt is in the midst of famine. The Inundation was down in the Cubits of Death; no crops germinated. We do not have sufficient to feed our own people, particularly those of Alexandria.”
Gnaeus Pompey, who looked very like his father save that his equally thick crop of hair was a darker gold, sucked his teeth and shook his head. “That won’t do!” he barked. “I want grain and I want food! Nor will I take no for an answer!”
“We have no grain, Gnaeus Pompeius. We have no food. We are not in a position to accommodate you, as we have explained.”
“Actually,” said Gnaeus Pompey casually, “you don’t have any choice in the matter. Sorry if your own people starve, but that’s not my affair. Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica the governor is still in Syria, and has more than enough good Roman troops to march south and crush Egypt like a beetle. You’re old enough to remember the arrival of Aulus Gabinius and what happened then. All I have to do is send to Syria and you’re invaded. And don’t think of doing to me what you did to the sons of Bibulus! I am Magnus’s son. Kill me or any of mine and you’ll all die very painfully. In many ways annexation would be best for my father and the government in exile. Egypt would become a province of Rome and everything Egypt possesses would go to Rome. In the person of my father. Think it over, Queen Cleopatra. I’ll return tomorrow.”
The lictors wheeled and marched out, faces impassive, Gnaeus Pompey strolling behind them.
“The arrogance!” gasped Theodotus, flapping his hands. “Oh, I don’t believe the arrogance!”
“Hold your tongue, tutor!” the Queen snapped.
“May I go?” the little King asked, his tears overflowing.
“Yes, go, you little toad! And take Theodotus with you!”
Out they went, the man’s arm possessively about the boy’s heaving shoulders.
“You’ll have to do as Gnaeus Pompeius has ordered you to do,” purred Potheinus.
“I am well aware of that, you self-satisfied worm!”
“And pray, mighty Pharaoh, Isis on Earth, Daughter of Ra, that Nilus rises into the Cubits of Plenty this summer.”
“I intend to pray. No doubt you and Theodotus—and your minion Achillas, commander-in-chief of my army!—intend to pray just as hard to Serapis that Nilus remains in the Cubits of Death! Two failed Inundations in a row would dry up the Ta-she and Lake Moeris. No one in Egypt would eat. My income would shrink to a point whereat, Potheinus, I could find little money for buying in. If there is grain to buy in. There is drought from Macedonia and Greece to Syria and Egypt. Food prices will keep on rising until the Nilus rises. While you and your two cronies urge a third kind of rise—the Alexandrians against me.”
“As Pharaoh, O Queen,” said Potheinus smoothly, “you have the key to the treasure vaults of Memphis.”
The Queen looked scornful. “Certainly, Lord High Chamberlain! You know perfectly well that the priests will not allow me to spend the Egyptian treasures to save Alexandria from starvation. Why should they? No native Egyptian is permitted to live in Alexandria, let alone have its citizenship. Something I do not intend to rectify for one good reason. I don’t want my best and loyalest subjects to catch the Alexandrian disease.”
“Then the future does not bode well for you, O Queen.”
“You deem me a weak woman, Potheinus. That is a very grave mistake. You’d do better to think of me as Egypt.”
Cleopatra had hundreds upon hundreds of servants; only two of them were dear to her, Charmian and Iras. The daughters of Macedonian aristocrats, they had been given to Cleopatra when all three were small children, to be the royal companions of the second daughter of King Ptolemy Auletes and Queen Cleopatra Tryphaena, a daughter of King Mithridates of Pontus by his queen. The same age as Cleopatra, they had been with her through all the stormy years since—through Ptolemy Auletes’s divorce of Cleopatra Tryphaena and the arrival of a stepmother—through the banishment of Auletes—through three years of exile in Memphis while the oldest daughter, Berenice, reigned with her mother, Cleopatra Tryphaena—through the awful time after Cleopatra Tryphaena’s death when Berenice searched frantically for a husband acceptable to the Alexandrians—through the return of Ptolemy Auletes and his resumption of the throne—through the day when Auletes had murdered Berenice, his own daughter—through the first two years of Cleopatra’s reign. So long!
They were her only confidantes, so it was to them that she poured out the story of her audience with Gnaeus Pompey.
“Potheinus is becoming insufferably confident,” she said.
“Which means,” said Charmian, dark and very pretty, “that he will move to dethrone you as soon as he can.”
“Oh, yes. I need to journey to Memphis and sacrifice in the true way to the true Gods,” Cleopatra said fretfully, “but I daren’t. To leave Alexandria would be a fatal mistake.”
“Would it help to write for advice to Antipater at the court of King Hyrcanus?”
“No use whatsoever. He’s all for the Romans.”
“What was Gnaeus Pompeius like?” asked Iras, who always thought of personalities, never of politics. She was fair and very pretty.
“In the same mold as the great Alexander. Macedonian.”
“Did you like him?” Iras persisted, blue eyes fondly misty.
Cleopatra looked exasperated. “As a matter of fact, Iras, I disliked the man intensely! Why do you ask such silly questions? I am Pharaoh. My hymen belongs to my equal in blood and deity. If you fancy Gnaeus Pompeius, go and sleep with him. You’re a young woman; you should by rights be married. But I am Pharaoh, God on Earth. When I mate, I do so for Egypt, not for my own pleasure.” Her face twisted. “Believe me, for no lesser reason than Egypt will I summon the fortitude to give my untouched body to the little viper!”
6
It was with a sense of enormous relief that Pompey the Great set out at the beginning of December to march westward along the Via Egnatia all the way to Dyrrachium. Sharing the palace in Thessalonica with more than half of Rome’s Senate had proven a nightmare. For they had all returned, of course, from Cato to his beloved older son, who had sailed in from Alexandria with a superb fleet of ten quinqueremes and sixty transports, the latter loaded to creaking point. Their cargo was supposed to be wheat, barley, beans and chickpea, but turned out to consist mostly of dates. Sweet and tasty for an Epicurean snack, unpalatable fare for soldiers.
“That stringy s
he-wolf monster!” Gnaeus Pompey had snarled after he discovered that only ten of the transports held wheat; the other fifty contained dates in jars he had seen filled with wheat. “She tricked me!”
His father, worn down by a combination of Cato and Cicero, chose to see the funny side, laughed himself to tears he couldn’t shed any other way. “Never mind,” he soothed his irate son, “after we’ve beaten Caesar we’ll hie ourselves off to Egypt and pay for this war out of Cleopatra’s treasury.”
“It will give me great pleasure personally to torture her!”
“Tch, tch!” clucked Pompey. “Not loverlike language, Gnaeus! There’s a rumor going round that you had her.”
“The only way I’d have her is roasted and stuffed with dates!” Which reply set Pompey laughing again.
*
Cato had returned just before Gnaeus Pompey, very pleased with the success of his mission to Rhodes, and full of the story of his encounter with his half sister, Servililla, divorced wife of the dead Lucullus, and her son, Marcus Licinius Lucullus.
“I don’t understand her any more than I do Servilia,” he said frowning. “When I encountered Servililla in Athens—she seemed to think she’d be proscribed if she stayed in Italia—she swore never again to leave me. Sailed the Aegaean with me, came to Rhodes. Started bickering with Athenodorus Cordylion and Statyllus. But when it came time to leave Rhodes, she said she was staying there.”
“Women,” said Pompey, “are queer fish, Cato. Now go away!”
“Not until you agree to tighten up on discipline among the Galatian and Cappadocian cavalry. They’re behaving disgracefully.”
Masters of Rome Boxset: First Man in Rome, the Grass Crown, Fortune's Favourites, Caesar's Women, Caesar Page 540
